Fox News sinks to new low

This has got to be one of the most juvenile things ever done by Fox News. They took Obama’s State of the Union address and specifically edited it and inserted their own soundtrack of — literally — crickets chirping after Obama makes two slightly humorous comments. Then they make fun of Obama because his jokes didn’t elicit more laughter. Watch it:

Well, we couldn’t hear any laughter because you so crudely edited it out. If you listen to the actual video of his speech (at 34 and 48 minutes), he got both laughter and applause for these jokes.

This was written by Iron Knee. Posted on Thursday, January 27, 2011, at 12:28 am. Filed under Hypocrisy. Tagged Fox News, Obama. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

I agree. Its unnecessary, irresponsible and shows poor judgement on multiple levels.

After the SOTUS and Rebuttal I flicked through the 3 major cable news networks. On Fox they were heralding the rebuttal while admitting it lacked real substance like the presidents debt reduction plan.
On MSNBC they were proclaiming essentially that republicans want to completely do away with Soc Sec and Med for anyone under 55 because of what the rebuttal did not say.
CNN seemed to have the most centric level headed discussion and was pointing out the pros and cons of both the SOTU and Rebuttal. They also carried the TP response in its entirety, which the other 2 did not (to my knowledge).

So IMO CNN won the most “fair and balanced” broadcast award for that event.

The “pat-down” joke was at the 34th minute if anyone wanted to check that one, too.

I really wish the phrase “fair and balanced” could be banished from the English language.

One thing that has always frustrated me about the discussion of media bias is the way that Fox has framed the debate to imply that “fair and balanced” is somehow the ideal for a news organization. To achieve this supposed ideal, networks like CNN bend over backwards to represent all sides of a debate as if they are equal. For example, any time CNN has someone discussing climate change, they must also have a skeptic (typically working for a think tank or an energy company), despite the fact that the peer-reviewed scientific evidence is OVERWHELMING. That’s also why the give equal time to creationism (sorry…”intelligent design”) whenever evolution comes up. The “we report, you decide” mentality has really had deleterious effects regarding scientific literacy in this country.

I bring this up, because CNN also went out of their way to broadcast Michelle Bachman’s response for the Tea Party Express web site. Are they trying to suggest that the Tea Party somehow deserves equal treatment as the official GOP response? If they are really trying to present all sides of the response, why did they not include any coverage of individual statements by other members of Congress who posted them on their web site? Is it perhaps because CNN and the TPE are co-hosting a 2012 primary debate?

A lot of us on this site criticize Fox News for the crap that they spew on their airwaves, but the damage that they have done goes far beyond their shows. By incessantly accusing the “Clinton News Network” and other mainstream media of liberal bias, they have induced a knee-jerk response in which these other organizations go out of their way to “prove” they are unbiased by giving significant time to the most whacked out crackpots on the right. I mean, seriously, the fact that we use a Fox News motto (“Fair and Balanced”) whenever ANY discussion of media bias comes up is very telling. And because their “news as entertainment” journalistic style was so successful in garnering ratings, other groups have followed suit. Now, instead of investing in meaningful debate and commentary, we get splashy graphics and statistics that are devoid of all frames of reference.

In the end, Fox will always pull crap like the clip above. MSNBC will always counter with Maddow et al. tilting at windmills. And CNN will always try to prove they are centrist by balancing every slightly-left-of-center view with an anarchical libertarian. Ultimately, it’s not about the news. It’s about each group carving out a demographic to gain as much marketshare and profit as possible.

fox News is brainwashing the 70% of people who watch it. That is its aim. It isn’t going to change. Rove is working for the rich to get richer and tells them what to say. “Fair and balanced” is just another brainwashing.

Only news I see is AP raw news at the APsite and Christian Science Monitor balanced news.

If the aim of Fox News was solely to brainwash its viewers, its influence would be much weaker. The problem is that Fox’s influence goes far beyond that. They shape the debate by coming up with overly simplistic, catchy terms like “Obamacare” (as opposed to “health care reform”), and repeating them until other networks pick them up. They constantly nitpick other news organizations to identify any hint of bias, while never acknowledging the elephant in their own room.

In short, they employ tactics that effect a response from other organizations. As a result, those other groups spend more time justifying their own actions rather than actually reporting.

Now Palin’s vitriol is spilling out “Winning the Future” of Obama’s has become WTF on Palin’s Facebook page. I guess her daughters, soap mouth washing language on Facebook didn’t fall far from the tree. How is that for a mixed metaphor?